Byline: JULIE WHEELWRIGHT

IT WAS a busy Friday night in the West Terminal of New York's John F Kennedy airport and security supervisor Clara Tejada was checking through passengers on several international flights. Amid the crush of travellers jostling to pass through the security detectors last September 22, Tejada noticed a young woman hovering tentatively near the gate. She was small, slim and blonde with a delicate oval face and wide grey-green eyes. She'd slid a tapestry bag into the X-ray machine but had stopped at the security gate. Tejada walked over and instructed the woman to pass through.

The woman refused, saying she was pregnant and was worried the equipment might harm her baby. Tejada eyed the bulky shape around her waist and shook her head, 'You're not pregnant, you've got something underneath your sweater.' When the woman insisted again that she was pregnant, Tejada prodded the lump with two fingers to check and felt something hard and unyielding. The woman began to tremble saying she'd changed her mind and decided she wouldn't take the London flight after all.

Suspecting a weapon or drugs, Tejada notified Alex Velez, the Port Authority police officer on duty that night, and he authorised a body search. Officer Velez glanced towards the gate. 'I saw the woman's face, she looked like she was in shock, like someone who'd done something wrong.' The woman told Tejada her name was Caroline Beale, a then 29-year-old civil servant from Leytonstone, Essex, who was returning from a holiday in Manhattan on an Air India flight with her common-law husband, Paul Faraway, and his younger brothers, Dominic and Samuel. Caroline asked if they could talk in a private place, so Tejada and her supervisor, Patricia Alvarez, took her to a cloakroom, littered with coats, broken chairs and scaffolding from building works. 'She looked dazed, agitated, like she was dreaming,' remembers Velez. Once there, Tejada told Caroline to lift up her sweater and remove whatever she had stuffed into the waistband of her trousers. Caroline carefully unhooked from her shoulders the strings from a carrier bag.

She held a heavy bundle that looked bright red through the patterned plastic and explained: 'This is my baby.' Tejada was puzzled: 'Where's your baby?' Caroline replied calmly, 'In the bag.' Tejada ran outside to tell Officer Velez, who called for back-up. Caroline was becoming increasingly anxious, repeating that her boyfriend didn't know about the pregnancy, and what would he think? Tejada, assuming that Caroline had suffered a late miscarriage, assured her that any man worth his salt would be understanding. She herself had experienced a miscarriage, and was warmly empathetic. But Tejada remembers her sympathy ebbing away as Caroline dropped the drawstring bag on to the floor, 'like it was groceries or garbage'.

Meanwhile, Alvarez went to the terminal to find Paul Faraway and his brothers, to tell them Caroline was ill and that a paramedic had been called to treat her. Then Officer Velez returned with his backup to arrest Caroline...